Some Good and Some Bad for Santa Barbara Homeless Issues

Father Jon-Stephen Hedges died a year ago, but one might have thought it was just yesterday based on all the eulogizing taking place inside the County Supervisors’ chambers this Tuesday. For 50 years, Hedges tended to Isla Vista’s broken and beaten as a man of the cloth, a mental-health professional, an elected official, and jail chaplain. Since his death last February at age 73 from liver failure, Hedges has been described as “a fixture” — in the Isla Vista community, that is — so many times he could be confused for an appliance. But all the testimonials — from his son, his wife, a fellow priest, a fellow chaplain, and others seeking to pave a path off the streets for those living there — converged on one point: hope.

ER doctor Jason Prystowsky recalled walking the railroad tracks with Hedges, looking for homeless people to help. Prystowsky came equipped with his stethoscope, he said; Hedges, with his sheriff’s badge, his clergy collar, “and a truly ugly satchel over his shoulder filled with mysterious ‘supplies.’” When their challenges became overwhelming, Prystowsky recalled, Hedges would let loose with an “Oh mercy” that would fill the sky with his deep baritone. This invariably was followed, he said, by a philosophical rant on the moral responsibility and imperative of hope. 

The real agenda of the day was to bestow Hedges’s name on a former two-story UCSB sorority house turned oil workers’ barracks located on El Colegio Road in Isla Vista that was just transformed into transitional housing for up to 50 chronically unhoused individuals last summer. It would be called, the supervisors agreed, the “Hedges House of Hope.” The name makes factual sense; Hedges helped trigger a sequence of highly improbable — but brilliantly improvised — events that ultimately led to its creation last May.